Alright, before I get into the thick of this review I feel it necessary to detail my stance on the Halo franchise as of late. While I loved the first two Halo games, the third kind of fell flat on its face and soured a lot of the appeal of the series for me. I might be in the minority here but I felt Halo 2, from a story perspective, was as close to perfect as they come (sans the abrupt ending). It took the great and mysterious setup of the first game and added an entirely new layer to the plot through the addition of the Arbiter and the struggle of the Elites within the Covenant.

Then that all fell apart with Halo 3 when Bungie ditched the side-story about the Arbiter to instead tell a story that was Halo 1 redux. To me, it was like seeing Spider-man 2 and being all excited for the possibilities of the where the third film could go, then finally seeing it and what I got was Spider-man 3. So after Halo 3 I decided to take a break from the franchise. I skipped Halo Wars, and probably would have skipped Halo 3: ODST if it wasn't for the promise of something completely new and different.

The biggest difference between this game and previous Halo fps titles is that in ODST you don't take control of Master Chief, who was a god of the battlefield, but instead play as members of an elite squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers prior to the events of Halo 3. You know, the guys you saw in Halo 2 and 3 that wore all black outfits and were constantly seen dropping down in pods from the sky to rendezvous with you. These folks aren't enhanced super-soldiers, they're simply human-beings who have great tactical skills and are inserted into the hairiest of situations to take out targets from behind enemy lines.

ODST also takes a different route in the way it unravels its story. Instead of just going from point A to point B killing a lot of aliens as you did in Halo 1-3, in ODST you're initially dropped into a hub-world, free to travel around as the "Rookie," an ODST squad member who was separated from the rest of his group after an attempted drop on a Covenant ship goes all kinds of wrong, scattering everyone in the squad to different locations across the city of New Mombasa, Africa.

When the Rookie finally does wake from his crash site, it's six hours later, the city has been torn apart, and none of your squad-mates are responding. You're alone, outnumbered, and the only hints you have as to your squadmates' locations are emergency beacons going off in various spots around the city. It then becomes your job as the Rookie to search the ruins of New Mombasa and piece together clues as to the whereabouts of your teammates, as well as what happened to New Mombasa in the six hours between crashing down and waking up.